When Kirk fires at Deela, she steps out of the way of his phaser beam. Even assuming that this acceleration thing can make her move at a significant fraction of lightspeed, she would be going millions of times normal. But that would mean that for every minute which passed for the normal speed folk, a couple of years would pass for her. Since Spock had time to analyse the Scalosian water and come up with a counter-agent, Kirk would be an old man or dead by the time he got to him.

Body Count :

Compton is killed when he is scratched.

Factoid :

Lee Cronin is actually a pseudonym for Gene L. Coon. Coon worked on "The Wild Wild West" show when it did an episode with a very similar premise to this one.

The Scalosian city is a re-use of the Eminiar VII city from "A Taste of Armageddon".

Plotline

Whilst exploring an outer quadrant of the galaxy the Enterprise responds to a distress call for the planet Scalos. Arriving, the ship finds the planet apparently deserted. A landing party beams down to investigate but finds no inhabitants, though a strange high pitched noise bothers them occasionally. Whilst investigating, one of the party vanishes from sight right in front of Kirk. The Captain beams up to the ship to handle the investigation, but finds the Enterprise plagued by strange malfunctions with no apparent cause. Strange equipment appears in the Life Support centre, and all attempts to remove it are repelled by an unseen force. Kirk himself is apparently hallucinating, feeling that he is being touched when nobody seems to be there. Computer analysis indicates that the ship has been invaded by a hostile force intent on taking over, with no possibility of resisting.

When Kirk's coffee is tampered with, the Captain finds himself in a state of hyper-acceleration, moving so fast that the rest of the crew appear motionless in comparison. Due to radiation on their planet the Scalosians had become both hyper-accelerated and infertile, and had decided to sieze the Enterprise using their lightning speed to evade any response. Kirk finds his missing crewman, Compton, working with the Scalosians. When Compton is slightly injured he instantly dies - a side effect of the drug used to accelerate him.

Whilst Kirk tries to pretend to go along with the invasion, seducing the Scalosian leader Deela, Spock works to analyse what is happening aboard the ship. He is eventually able to isolate the drug used to accelerate Kirk and develop a cure. Taking the accelerant himself, he joins forces with Kirk to defeat the invaders and send them back to Scalos. Spock then gives Kirk the antidote and conducts a lightning-fast set of repairs on the ship before taking it himself.

Analysis

Trek has done the "super fast" thing a couple of times now. Looked at critically, the idea simply cannot hold water - as my "Live fast... write badly" article goes into, there are various reasons why you simply cannot go charging around the place at tremendously high speeds.

However, like the other such episodes, if we ignore the impossibility of the basic premise and concentrate on the episode as a piece of drama, it is actually quite a good one. The concept of invaders that can move so fast that you can't possibly deal with them is an interesting and slightly disturbing one, and the scenes of accelerated time with the normal crew stood statue-like are visually interesting to say the least.

It's also good that the Scalosians are not a stereotypically evil species. Deela at least is actually quite a sympathetic character, and while her henchmen are rather more shallow you can't help but feel for the guy's situation - especially given the rather unsympathetic way she treats him.